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Unkempt expressions and a lost tale

For those who have read Manik Bandyopadhyay’s Padma Nadir Majhi, (Pratikriti recently staged it at the Academy of Fine Arts), the novel defies time, place and all that one expects to see on stage when they think of the work. When staged, it doesn’t need to be just a bland repetition of the novel. A play based on a novel can be liberal with the contours of the story. The flow and the characters can be moulded and re-moulded as long as they follow the essence of the story. If the essence is lost, the play is lost. Padma Nadir Majhi lost its way trying to draw definite lines for the audience. In an attempt to give a body to the story that is so ethereal, Alok Deb (director) succeeded in forming the skeletal structure and left it at that, probably exhausted. Exhaustion is what supersedes throughout the play till the end when the director puts forward his farewell words to the viewers. It would be better to call the play an earthly version of the story so divine. Padma (the river) is more protagonistic than Kuber (the boatman). It looms over the lives of the fishermen as a magical enchantress, the provider and the destroyer. The play stripped Padma of its magnanimous power. A song seemed to be sufficient to acknowledge Padma’s presence. In the play, Kuber was the protagonist instead and it stopped then and there. The actor, however, with his phenomenal acting did justice to the responsibility. The play, further, was symbolically weak. Moinadwip remained just a place. In the play, many things existed just on the surface.The stage remained arid just like the lives of the boatmen. The light effects (by Joy Sen) were a disappointment as they were inconsistent. The ripples of the river, which was seen in the beginning of the play, kept on subsiding and towards the end, there were no ripples at all. Probably the viewers were expected to get adapted. The music (by Alok Deb) was the soul of the play. It said what most actors could not. The dialogues, with a tinge of East Bengal, were rustic and very original. Kuber, Hussein Mia, Kapila and Gopi lived the characters on stage while Ganesh, who tried hard to be Kuber’s friend, could not put across the same emotions. The director chose to part with Dhananjay’s character, which is there in the novel. The narrator seemed like an unnecessary presence on stage.Almost everything on stage was fluctuating. The acting at times was so good that they almost invoked the characters from the novel and the next moment, it was so over the top that they got stifled to a good degree. The director failed to capture many such elements that could have enlivened the story on stage. The scene with innumerable lanterns on the river (in the novel) was not difficult and yet went missing from the play. Overall, the play surfaced as a very amateurish presentation of a novel so mature. With realistic make-up and props, acting (of a few), soulful songs and the script, the play could have pulled up a bit more. However, the attempt by Pratikriti to put up a play based on a novel known to be unfit for stage is commendable indeed. It was courageous of Pratikriti. This is not the first time it has staged a one-act play based on a novel. It has been doing this since its foundation. Padma Nadir Majhi , the play, was staged to commemorate the 100th birth anniversary of Manik Bandyopadhyay.

Soma Basu

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